The 2010-2011 La Niña weather event brought lush vegetation to vast semi-arid regions in the Southern Hemisphere and altered the delicate balance of the global carbon sinks. Owen Gaffney explores how La Niña might change in the future and what that might imply.

Opinion

The United Nations has struggled to deliver on many environmental and developmental challenges. Time for new thinking, then, which is why UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has set up the Global Sustainability Panel. But how can science contribute? Owen Gaffney discusses the panel with Janos Pasztor .

In 2000, Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen, IGBP Vice-chair at the time, and Eugene F. Stoermer proposed that humanity had driven the world into a new geological epoch. They named this epoch "the Anthropocene". The article below, which was published in IGBP's Global Change magazine (Newsletter 41) at the time, articulates the concept. In 2002, a related article was published in the journal Nature. In recent years, the concept has gained much attention within the scientific community and now more widely.

This issue features a special section on carbon. You can read about peak greenhouse-gas emissions in China, the mitigation of black carbon emissions and the effect of the 2010-2011 La Niña event on gl...

This issue features a full-spread infographic on deltas at risk, accompanied by a Q&A with IGBP Chair James Syvitski. You can also read about coastal megacities, the progress in crystallising the Sust...